Social Media

Sports and Social Media: Where Opportunity and Fear Collide

There has been no shortage of stories on athletes using Twitter and social media to further their personal agendas.

On the flip side, we've also seen the organizations behind the professional sports leagues, and the media outlets covering them, struggle between their desire to understand and embrace social media and their fear of losing control of their entertainment properties.

Athletes and their representatives, coaches, staff members, and media analysts all pose a threat to the status quo. Cincinnati Bengals Wide Receiver Chad Ochocinco's in-game tweets could mean that fans follow him over watching the television interview, Andy Roddick's tennis tweets could reveal insider information, the ESPN analysts' tweets on sports stories could attract off-camera discussion; the bottom line is that control of the message is slipping away with Twitter as a medium. It's this fear of losing control that is driving organizations to restrict what gets said in a social media space.

Here we'll explore the state of sports and social media, take a look at the sports media milieu, and dive into the new policies that are popping up on a weekly basis.

Athlete Opportunities and Faux Pas

Ever since Shaq became the Twitter evangelist for the top echelon of celebrities, athletes from all sectors of the sports world have flocked to the self-made man's media platform. There's no doubt about it, athletes have embraced the opportunity to connect directly with fans via Twitter and other social media tools.

Those very same sports figures are raising their personal profiles, independent of their teams, and creating social identities that could drive and support future business opportunities. It's a win-win for them. Or is it?

On the plus side, athletes are connecting with fans like never before. They're responding to replies, hosting live Ustream web broadcasts, dropping in on tweetups, and using social media in creative and strategic ways.

In the other corner of the ring, however, players are finding themselves in hot water if they tweet the wrong thing, or creating a media frenzy with their trash talk (Ochocino vs. Merriman, Shaq vs. Howard). It's enough of a problem that the Chargers fined Antonio Cromartie, and his account has since been made private (the embed above is Norv Turner's response to questions about the fine).

But that's just it, the athletes themselves may suffer slightly at the hands of the media, or their team, but their online presence is only heightened should they create a social stir. So we're likely to see Ochocinco pay a fine to be the first to tweet from an end zone (if he doesn't get discouraged and quit first), and benefit from the barrage of coverage and followers that it's likely to afford him.

The Conflicted Sports Media

Now that the athletes have set up shop on social media sites, the sports media has followed suit. They've made a complete 180 from their initial rejection of Twitter, and instead are using the platform to break news first, before they pen their articles. They can follow the athletes themselves, find fodder for their stories, and beat the competition with instantaneous player reactions.

And yet, all is not happy in the home of sports media and social media. It's an arranged marriage of sorts, where fear of cheating prevents a truly harmonious union.

Just take ESPN's relationship with social media. The sports network contracts analysts and athletes as their on-air broadcast talent, but these personalities can also be active social media socialites, and hence the problem. Their new social media policy, which prohibits talent from discussing sports stories via social media ("personal websites and blogs that contain sports content are not permitted"), was even interpreted by one analyst as ESPN telling talent they can only tweet about ESPN.

We previously got to take an uncharacteristic look behind the curtain of ESPN's revised new media policy, and we chatted with those who were intimately involved in the creation process. The long and short of it is that ESPN believes that their talents' personal brands are inextricable from the network, and as such they're not willing to open the doors to open tweeting. In fact, in rare occasions, they might discourage talent from tweeting altogether.

While policies tend to be inline with standard broadcast policies, we have to wonder if ESPN is limiting their reach. Could an open marriage, where talent is encouraged to engage with social audiences really be all that bad for the brand? Sure something inappropriate would get said from time to time, but chances are that Twitter followers would turn into more active broadcast viewers if those conversations were integrated with television coverage, or even if the talent in question were able to reply to twittered sports queries.

One example of a more open relationship is the one that St. John's has developed with heavily followed basketball Twitterer, Peter Robert Casey. The fan with 50,000 plus followers has been bumped up the media food chain and granted an all season seat in press row for the 2009-10 St. John's men's basketball season. The arrangement means that he can tweet in real-time about game updates, which is especially notable since under new NFL rules, no such deal could happen.

Organizational Social Chaos

In just the past few weeks, the US Open, NFL, and SEC have all dramatically restricted what players, coaches, agents, and media can post to social media sites.

In the case of the US Open, they've banned Twittering from the tennis court and issued strict warnings about tweeting “information about the likely participation or likely performance of a player in an event or concerning the weather, court conditions, status, outcome, or any other aspect of an event which is known by a covered person and is not information in the public domain.”

The NFL has also banned Twittering during games. Their new social media policy is an even stricter follow-up to their original Twitter restrictions. The new rules prohibit tweeting 90 minutes before and after games, and applies to players, coaches, team personnel, and officials. The media have also been warned about their Twittering ways. So while fans in the stands can tweet about Ochocinco's touchdown and mariachi band, Ochocinco and the media will have to stay mute (when using social media).

That portion of the policy reads, "While a game is in progress, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount (e.g., score updates with detail given only in quarterly game updates) so that the accredited organization’s game coverage cannot be used as a substitute for, or otherwise approximate, authorized play-by-play accounts.”

And then there's the SEC, whose original new media policy created an outrage amongst fans and forced them to reconsider their ways. So what was the big deal? Well, the SEC took it upon themselves to practically ban social media usage at SEC games in any capacity. So, “Ticketed fans can’t “produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event.”

The policy is motivated by their desire to protect their entertainment content, CBS contract, and online initiatives, but the policy is unmanageable and inappropriate. The SEC doesn't own the way you experience a college football game, and would never be successful at preventing photos and videos from trickling out of stadiums. They've since revised the policy to instead prohibit real-time transmissions of game, and for-profit video and photos, but the fear is still palpable.

Laugh in the Face of Fear

Our own editor-in-chief, Adam Ostrow, said it best when he stated, "Sure, these days someone could theoretically live stream a game from their camera phone. But a shaky, low resolution video from the upper deck of Yankee Stadium isn’t exactly the same as watching FOX’s telecast on your big screen TV. Social media should be viewed as a fantastic compliment to sports that is good for both fans and the TV networks, but at the moment, it seems that’s anything but how it’s being perceived."

And that's just it. Social media is a compliment to sports. While it presents a few new challenges, the opportunities are abundant and everyone from the athlete on the field to the network executive can reap the rewards. Now is the time to make your product the best it can be, to let fans, players, and broadcast talent own their opinions and game experiences, and combine the pristine content with the off-the-cuff variety to engage fans like never before.

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